«The limbs and the wheel»: about Coronation by Michel Deguy

Abstract

On 13 March 2020, in the magazine Po&sie, which he founded, Deguy published a text entitled Coronation. Here, the reading of the contingent viral situation and certain concomitant events made use of his particular interpretative lens aimed at the poetic fact: the continuous exorbitance of the verbal matter from the confined space of the text, and the 'oppugnance' between its inside and outside, as a gift and its antidote. The twofold meaning of the lemma corona (here explored with reference to the tradition and to the modern poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry) leads us back to the double status of the virus: both evil and remedy. By overflowing its borders, the virus pervades the global world, becoming a metaphor for contemporary evils and at the same time urging the critical act. We are left, as Deguy notes in La Poésie n'est pas seule, with «that homeopathic vaccine, catalysis and apocalypse, which adds to the world its end, 'precipitates' its end, is the possibility of art».